"I came for the free beer, and I expected the quiz part to be lame, but it wasn't and this whole evening has been a whole lot of fun," said one engineer. Indeed. For me too. And it is with much thanks to Max the Magnificent and David Ashton that the quiz part of the pub quiz was most certainly not lame. Even if it was extremely difficult and lacking in 70’s music trivia. Point taken. Brush up on your ABBA knowledge for the next one!

Last December, around the same time, I organized my first "Fission Chips" engineering meet up at a bar in San Jose. The music was a bit loud, and other than booze and some cool networking, there wasn't much else on offer, but we packed out a room, and that was a good start. The pub quiz is a second attempt, and it felt a lot more... engaging.

With engineering teams from Globalfoundries, Atmel, NXP, Airbus, Amazon Hardware, Nuvation, and various other companies, we drew quite the crowd for a quiet Tuesday night in Mountain View.

Nuvation, makers of Burning Man’s famous Disco Fish, went even above and beyond by bringing along and setting up their home engineered Angry Moose catapult game, based on the popular Angry Birds mobile app, but with a cute Canadian twist.

The crowd went wild for Angry Moose during the break, and though the pubs disco ball was fired at rather more often than the beer cans, I assure you no Moose or Canadians were harmed and a good time was had by all.

The teams fought hard (some, admittedly harder than others… *cough* naming no names, *cough*). And there were of course those who tried to confuse the competition with shouts of “Steve Jobs” for every answer (even though that answer only applied to about 1 in every four questions.) But it was all good natured. Except for the chicken wing carnage… that was brutal.

Also, out of 40 questions, Amazon’s Lab126 hardware division team, re-dubbed “Four Stroke Super Pocket Bike” by themselves and “The smart asses in the corner” by everyone else managed a whopping 33 points, winning the quiz outright. They all went home with some shiny new dev kits to play with.

We’re hoping to make this a fairly frequent thing, so, if any of you have any suggestions for how to improve it or enhance it next time around, I’d love to hear from you!

So far, the number one request? More questions that involve me trying to pronounce words like "sexagesimal” in my misunderstood quasi British accent. Thanks for that one, Max… sigh.